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Dear Diary

A 3882-post collection

Finally, mostly prepared

I have a nice set of gloves, now. And two pairs of socks to wear in my boots. And enough ginger ale to float a boat.

I should finally be able to shake these winter sniffles and ride out the rest of the cold season in relative comfort. Should.

Except that it's this bloody cold at the beginning of the season and I'm already entertaining thoughts of thermal underwear. I need to find all my polyester stuff because it's freaking perfect for winter.

And weirdly - following the flooded weekend - it's been really dry. Beloved and I have both had cases of crunchy eyeballs. Beloved's needed eye drops and me - well, I did what I always do when I have to rub my eyes a lot - I got another dose of the sniffles.

Poor Chaos has a lingering chesty cough and phlegm that won't shift. We're pulling out all the stops. Or we would be if her steam vaporiser was working. It's just one damn thing after another. I swear.

Good news: I finished the second chapter of my novel, yesterday, and commence the third today. Things are rattling along marvellously on that front, at least. And I solved the dexterity problem of typing with gloves on, by using two of my ever-present pens to tap the keys instead. I'm sill working on the typos.

I may yet get sick of this way and just type normally. Warm fingers are clumsy fingers, sadly.

And when it's warmer, my stash and I will be playing with design options. I have my sample 'flags'. Now I need some sample pretties. Three pairs of each. And I need to make that needle rig I've been gassing about for nearly a week.

I promise not to sneeze or cough on any of my work.

It's fixed!

My car is up and able again and I now have emergency assistance. It became a thing somewhere between the time I go the car and months later, when I finally got a service.

I also had the biggest comedy of errors that anyone could hope to avoid. First - Beloved insisted I take the kids to school. On the one day that I definitely had Other Plans. Then, the car wouldn't start. So I had to nick Beloved's car while the

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This is why I need to be mobile

I'm taking my car in for a service, today. They usually occupy most of my frelling time. All day. Spinning my wheels. Followed by a mad rush in the evening to get my work, dinner, and kids done for the day.

Not today! For I have a fully-operational laptop and all my important documents in my Google Docs folder. Yay. I just have to make sure they're "fresh" before I set off.

Which means crossing the house, opening the lappy, refreshing every

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Wish me luck

The rains of last night have buggered off and it's looking like it's going to be a lovely, sunny day. And today, Beloved is home, so I finally have a chance to edit KFZ and start trawling for agents.

New York is the place to look, apparently. Those are the agents with the global scope and reach.

Beloved's focus will be on making a thing to hold a pen so we can print out those earring cards at firkin last. But I

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Good morning

Once again, my fucked-up sleep cycle strikes in the wee small hours. I plan to use it to my advantage, though. You all get your instant story ahead of time, and I get a day of luxurious loafing.

The only downside for me is that I'll have to update my master files when I finally exit my bedroom. Yay for laptops, boo for non-cloud files.

Pretty sure the Google editor does rich text and not plain text. That could plausibly fuck up

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*Determination*

I am going to make something today. I am done with sorting the cabochons. The only pile of unsorted beads I have is a baggie of random reds, and I am not touching those until I have done. One. Firkin. PAIR.

I am going to make earrings until I am sick of it, or I have sample examples of each of my pride flag earrings firkin DONE. Whichever happens first.

Then, and only then, will I indulge my OCD aspect and sort

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Snafu^3

My best laid plans haven't just gone agley. They're flapping in the breeze. Pissing into the wind. Whistling Dixie.

Inertia is my enemy. I fucking hate it. And I really despise it when the object at rest happens to be people I need to do things for my. My skill set is limited. My ideas of design are either (a) antiquated, (b) fucking ugly, or (c) both. This is why I handed a concept sketch to Beloved for the EGDB logo instead

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Plus la Change, Plus la Meme Chose

Another book, another routine. Another chain of illogic to boggle your average nypical. It goes a little something like this:

  1. Hand-writing things may be permanently portable, but transcribing it to legible text just slows me down because (a) I'm the only person who can read my handwriting (b) I can't afford to hire someone who can read my handwriting and (c) I end up reading what I've written more than typing in the thing.
  2. It really is quicker and easier for me
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Attack of the Lurgi

Of course, once winter comes, so too do the winter colds. Both my little darlings are home for a couple of days and I am beginning to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous procrastination.

Of course, delaying at writing means that I spend less time working on sorting all my beads. Now that I have a new supply of dime bags [I should really stop calling them that. Besides, my new lot are half the size of your traditional Suspicious White

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Winter has hit

I know it's not officially winter yet, but you can't fool my bod. All the signs are here. It's dark in the morning. The incidences of Lurgi are increasing. I need a jumper and a huge box of tissues in the morning... and the heater is staying on without anyone wanting to turn it off.

It's very hard to get out of bed in the AM.

I've removed the non-helpful insole from my boots, and that has been very helpful in getting

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URGH

You ever have one of those days where everything and everyone seems to be conspiring against you to make sure every last one of your plans fucks up? Even the very elements of nature seem to be against you.

That's been my entire week.

The beads I thought were fine - aren't. If I want to pump out earrings at any speed, I have to delay by making my own pins out of the aforementioned scary thin wire. Which means I have

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SNAFU^2

Turns out that a shockingly large number of my seed beads don't fit on a standard pin. This is something of a major flaw in beads, generally. If they don't fit onto the findings - what the fuck are you supposed to do?

It would cost me more to send them back, so my plan is - use what I can and get beads from a different mob when I run out of useful ones.

Also - find a profitable use for

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::inchoate groan::

There is not enough coffee in my house to help me deal with today. There may not be enough coffee in the shops to help me deal with today. The world... might have enough coffee to help me deal with today.

Why?

Because I firkin woke up at midnight and had spotty sleep thereafter. Which does not do a damn thing to assist in my feelings towards peace, love, or your average mung bean.

That on top of the trip there and

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No business today

Chaos is due to seek help in Maroochydore again. And it's one heck of a long-ass trip there and back. The sooner that the nearer clinic has help for her, the better.

The metallic sharpies have a nib width that's too wide for legible printing, so Beloved and I went on an emergency run to Officeworks by way of Spotlight for something a little narrower. So now we won a double brace of metallic gel pens that are, quite frankly, made of

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The struggle continues...

It takes longer to twist a piece of wire into being a pin than it does to measure the firkin thing. I have proof.

[Shown here: two rectangular takeout boxes, one with bits of cut wire in it, and the other with wires bent to serve as pins]

That's three hours' work. With extra swearing at the pliers I have because the spring is firkin dodgy. I have to press it back into place between pins or suffer the consequences.

The first

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